Tele-conferences, video conferences and virtual meetings include participants at multiple physical locations interacting through a variety of devices including computers and smart phones. Often there is a main location for the meeting containing multiple participants at a single physical location and one or more remote participants located at different physical locations. The remote participants utilize a variety of methods to participate in the meeting including audio, video and computer or text based methods. However, these remote participants can experience difficulty in participating in the meeting and the current conversation. Remote participants are effectively ‘invisible’. Similarly, participants collocated in a room often ‘forget’ about remote participants, because there are no visual cues or reminders about the existence and participation of the remote participants. Remote participants make their presence known only by speaking, which can be awkward to the meeting and can interrupt the current flow of the meeting.
Engagement of the collocated participants in the meeting is easily determined by determining where the collocated participants are looking, i.e., collocated participants shift their gazes to the participant that is speaking. Also, collocated participants will look at slides, pictures or writings on a board. A failure to visually track the activity of the meeting is strong indicator that collocated participants are not engaged in the meeting. These indications of visual engagement with the meeting activities, i.e., speakers and presentation materials, are not available to the collocated participants for the remote participants. Existing systems that support remote participation in meetings either do not do not provide collocated participants with an indication, e.g., video indication, of the visual engagement of the remote participants or require remote participants to have access to and to use expensive and specialized equipment to provide an indication of visual engagement to the collocated participants, e.g., eye tracking devices and video conferencing rooms with specialized cameras.
Therefore, a need exists for systems and methods that provide collocated participants with an indication of the visual engagement of remote participants in a meeting without the need for specialized equipment at remote locations.